these motivational applications and
partially because many new application areas are building their own best
practices for supporting gameful designs. Particularly, the challenge of
engaging in a gameful activity willfully and voluntarily remains an important factor in a space where people
have to engage in virtual simulations
and “serious games” because they
need training on specific methods
or tools. In gamification, the activities we are designing must not only
be goal-oriented and rule-driven but
also be meaningful for our users. In
the spirit of HCI-for-good, gameful
designers must be willing to build
applications that work to improve
people’s lives and their physical and
mental states. If play is at the heart of
learning, games are the frameworks
that help us understand and better
ourselves as we gather more knowledge of who we are.

As we reach a stage where humans
are struggling to keep up with technological innovation, we can expect many
exciting new applications of gameful
design that will facilitate the use of
emerging technologies in the future. If
we are mindful of the humans we are
designing for, gameful design will provide limitless opportunities.

E. From game design elements to gamefulness:
Defining ‘gamification.’ In Proceedings of Mind Trek

2011 ( Tampere, Finland). ACM, New York, 2011,

9-15. doi: 10.1145/2181037.2181040

Biography

Dr. Lennart Nacke is director of the HCI Games Group and
an associate professor for Human-Computer Interaction
and Game Design at the University of Waterloo. His
research focuses on people and technology in the wider
context of digital games, specifically gamification, user
experience, and games user research. He is one of the
founders of the CHI PLAY conference series and currently
serves as the chair of the CHI PLAY steering committee.

The ability to measure every aspect of one’s activities led to many
good things—not least the many
opportunities people now had to
track their fitness and health. However, the rise of gamification also
brought the risk of a hollow and
frustrated world, with users made to
do tasks that did not contribute to
self-improvement or personal learning. Points and badges were used for
meaningless progression in a digital system; leaderboards provided a
“digital whip” for employees not performing at a high level. We saw the
dangers of gamification. In many
instances, digital marketing became
synonymous with gamification,
leading designers astray from core
concepts of self-determination like
personal competence, autonomy,
and relatedness to others.

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Gamification should serve the purpose of improving peoples’ lives, and
not tie them to some proprietary technology as consumers. Fortunately, we
are seeing many good—and successful—approaches within HCI, where
gamification is being used to create
enjoyable personalized user experiences that lead to positive behavioral
changes and self-improvement.

Providing customized interfaces
to cater to new and experienced users has long been a popular approach
in interface design. But often the
onboarding process has been overlooked. Onboarding is particularly
important in games since their compelling nature stems from the learning opportunities they provide. Good
gamification personalizes this learning to the individual skills of each
user, assisting them in the best possible way. Gamification must draw on
many core HCI fields, such as psychology, crowdsourcing, interface design,
logging and tracking technologies,
and intelligent machine algorithms.

A new breed of designers is work-ing on “gameful” design: Develop-ing non-trivial, but achievable, goalsthat users are motivated to pursueunder an arbitrary set of behavioralrules. The user experience is guidedby these goals and rules. Another im-portant factor in gameful design isthat users consider their motivationto engage with an application in thefirst place as voluntary. Designingtechnologies this way is challengingbecause of the careful onboardingand initial impressions required tobuild successful gameful applica-tions. However, as motivation, en-gagement, and user experience havebecome important drivers of publicpolicy goals in health, education,and civic engagement, gameful ex-periences are becoming the primaryoutcomes of gamification.

The gameful design paradigm is
quite different from “playful” design,
which has been a common approach
to creating better user experiences in
the context of HCI. The latter is more
fluid and lacks the goal orientation so
essential to the former. The rules and
goals that are afforded by games, and
thus included in gameful design, better lend themselves to building engaging products focused on behavioral improvements and changes. Indeed, the
motivation and engagement gameful
design promises to deliver are founded on this goal-and-rule structure. In
practice, however, the lines can blur,
and gameful applications often include playful elements to provide a
richer frame of interaction. Nevertheless, it is important for user experience designers to know the difference
bet ween designing play and designing
a game, even if both interactions are
present in the final product.

As this new design area is emerging in HCI, gamification will remain
an important field of study for years
to come, partially because we still
lack a body of rigorous studies investigating the long-term effects of
A constant
challenge for
researchers remains
the scientific
assessment of
the “fun” part of
a user experience.